Let us study divorce from the point of view of its utility. Divorce offers an advantage in preventing marriage from being regarded as an endless chain, a crushing yoke, or a prison deliberately chosen as a livelihood. It means, in fact, that people need not be tightly bound together who cannot bear so to live; it would put an end to what is sometimes extreme mental suffering, abolish dangers which sometimes lead to murder; in a word, it means escape from “the sentimental and emotional results of the indissolubility of marriage.” The termination of miserable “marriages of convenience” would ensure for many a new life, the production of healthier children under normal conditions; from the social point of view, it would increase the value of the man and the woman. How many live together for long years who are strangers to each other in body and soul! How many slaves of marriage there are, whose union is unnatural, childless, and made hideous by mutual hatred! Why should one see, in the name of a religious principle, these infernos--whose tortures are as varied as they are crushing--perpetuated? Why should not reason, individual rights, be allowed to correct ill-chance, false calculations, and disappointed hopes? Why should a woman, who no longer finds in her husband the moral support she needs, submit to the horrors of a long agony without defence, of perpetual strife in which she is miserably vanquished; on the other hand, why should the man who does not find in his wife the companion--or even the slave--he desired, see the way to happiness closed to him for ever? Marriage is based on a contract. Every contract can be rectified, modified, or broken. In a compact, there must be mutual agreement; from the moment when the agreement ceases to be respected by either of the parties, it is naturally dissolved. Before the establishment of divorce the husband and wife who lived on bad terms had to endure suffering worse than death, for nothing, I repeat, is to be compared with the torment of being tied, body and soul, in hatred, contempt, or even merely in indifference.